Dance Pick: Joint Venture

This week, Joan Acocella writes about “Joint Array,” a 1971 video installation at the New Museum by the artist Charles Atlas, who collaborated for four decades with the brilliant choreographer Merce Cunningham. In the exhibition, twenty-three monitors show closeups of elbows, knees, ankles, and so on. As Acocella observes, “It’s just such physical facts that Cunningham (1919-2009) highlighted, and that’s why a lot of spectators walked out of his early concerts. Who cares about an elbow? Later, though, people started thinking that maybe the body parts were signalling other matters: fear, calm, heroism. Part of the twentieth-century modernist program was to make familiar things seem strange. Atlas, who eventually became one of America’s foremost dance videographers, does that, and so did Cunningham.” Watch a clip of Atlas’s 1981 video of Cunningham’s “Roamin’ 1.”

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